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Toni Bowers

Professor of English

(she/her/hers)

Curriculum Vitae

Fisher-Bennett Hall 239

Office Hours

2025

 

 

Toni Bowers

Professor

(Ph.D. Stanford University)

I retired in July, 2024, after 33 years as a member of the standing faculty in Penn's English Department. Because I love working with students, I have chosen to continue teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at Penn and elsewhere. My title remains "Professor of English."

I'll be teaching a new graduate course, "How to Read Poetry," in Penn's Master of Liberal Arts program in Fall, 2025.

My new edition of Richardson's Pamela (1740), co-edited with Professor Albert Rivero (Marquette University), is currently complete and in production at Broadview Press. Pamela, as my students know, was one of the most influential literary works in Europe during the eighteenth century. Silently abridged versions abound to this day, but the new Broadview edition will be the first edition of the entire novel in more than a century.

Now I am editing for publication two previously unpublished memoirs by colleagues of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. Each vividly presents facets of Chaplin's personality and artistic processes. With assistance from Penn graduate student Peter Diamond and Penn undergraduate Aubrey Chenxi Shi, I have completed the digitalization of both memoirs. I expect to complete the editing and annotations in late 2025.

I recently recorded a selection of lyric poetry by women for PennSound Classics at Kelly Writers House.

A representative selection of my publications, course teaching, and doctoral advising appears on this page. For more about my published books, articles, teaching, and professional service, please see the Curriculum Vitae (CV)  linked above.

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

"'The Abdicated Family': Hume's Partisan Grammar in 'Of the Protestant Succession'" Restoration: Study in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 (2015)
"Dancing with Michael Jackson" Los Angeles Review of Books (2015)

Awards

2022 Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2016

Alice Tweedy McGrath "Patchwork Fictions: Imagining Intimacy Beyond the Marriage Plot"

2015

Alyssa Connell " Paper Kingdom: Travel Literature, Chorography, and the Writing of Britain, 1660-1770"

2012

David Alff "British Writing and the Culture of Projection: 1660–1790"

2004

Juliet Shields "Engendering Great Britain: Literary Representations of Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1700-1730"

2003

Brett Wilson "Maudlin Whigs: Gender, Feeling, and Party on the British Stage, 1688-1746"

Courses Taught

fall 2022

ENGL 1800.001 Poetry and Poetices: Introduction to Lyric Poetry canceled  

spring 2022

ENGL 090.401 Writing Women, Part 2  
ENGL 392.401 Charles Chaplin's Film and the Politics of Silence  

fall 2021

ENGL 069.001 Studies in Lyric Poetry  
ENGL 090.402 Writing Women, Part 1  

spring 2021

ENGL 069.001 Studies in Lyric Poetry  
ENGL 090.401 Sexuality and Power  

fall 2020

ENGL 090.401 Writing Women: 1660 to 1760  
ENGL 392.402 European Pantomime and the Films of Charles Chaplin  

fall 2019

ENGL 090.401 Gender, Sexuality and Literature  
ENGL 345.301 Traveling with Gulliver: The Many Lives of a Text  

fall 2018

ENGL 090.401 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature: Writing Women, 1660-1760  
ENGL 545.301 Eighteenth-Century Novels  

summer 2018

ENGL 060.950 London Fictions: Penn in London  

spring 2018

ENGL 060.001 Early British Novels  
ENGL 345.301 Epistolary Fiction  

fall 2017

ENGL 047.001 Scottish Literature: An Introduction to major works from the 18th-Century to the Present.  
ENGL 090.401 Writing Women: 1680-1800 Women as authors and as subject (literary, political, domestic) during the long eighteenth century.  

spring 2017

ENGL 047.001 Scottish Literature canceled  

fall 2016

ENGL 345.401 Epistolary Fiction  
ENGL 544.401 Richardson canceled  
ENGL 545.401 Epistolary Fiction in a European Frame  

spring 2016

ENGL 245.401 The Pamela Craze  
ENGL 548.301 Reading for Teaching: The Long Eighteenth-Century Canon and Digital Analysis Methods  

fall 2015

ENGL 047.001 Scottish Literature  
ENGL 345.301 British Epistolary Fiction  

spring 2015

ENGL 345.301 British Epistolary Fiction  
ENGL 730.301 Topics in 17th-Century History and Culture: Imagining Union  

spring 2014

ENGL 341.301 Pamela Craze  
ENGL 540.301 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture  

spring 2012

ENGL 090.401 Writing Women: 1660-1800  
ENGL 736.301 British Literature: The 1680's  

fall 2011

ENGL 045.001 18th Century British Novel  
ENGL 390.401 Sexuality and Power  

spring 2011

ENGL 090.401 Writing Women: British Women and Literature, 1660-1800  
ENGL 345.301 Richardson and Epistolarity  

fall 2010

ENGL 245.301 Epistolary Origins of English Fiction  
ENGL 730.401 Epistolary Fiction  

spring 2010

ENGL 045.401 18th-Century Novel  
ENGL 341.401 The Pamela Craze  

fall 2009

ENGL 090.401 Writing Women, 1660-1800  
ENGL 748.301 18th Century British Literature: Richardson  

spring 2009

ENGL 090.401 18th - Century Women Writers  
ENGL 245.401 Epistolary Fiction  

fall 2008

ENGL 360.301 Theory and Practice of the Novel  
ENGL 736.301 The 1680s: Literature, Politics, Ideas  

spring 2008

ENGL 090.401 Eighteenth-Century Women Writers  
ENGL 241.301 The Pamela Craze: A Research Seminar  

fall 2007

ENGL 045.001 Eighteenth Century Novel  
ENGL 553.401 18th Century Women Writers  

spring 2006

ENGL 090.401 Gender, Sexuality and Literature  
ENGL 540.401 Seduction and Literature  

fall 2005

ENGL 045.001 18th Century Novel  
ENGL 345.301 Topics in 18th Century Novel: Writing Seduction 1660-1800  

spring 2005

ENGL 345.401 The Pamela Controversy  
ENGL 553.401 Writing Women, 1660-1760  

fall 2003

ENGL 016.302 Ways of Reading canceled  
ENGL 045.001 18th Century Novel canceled  

spring 2002

ENGL 060.001 Major British Novel 1660-1914  
ENGL 245.301 Topics in 18th Century Novel  

fall 2001

ENGL 245.401 Topics in 18th Century Novel  
ENGL 544.401 Richardson  

spring 2001

ENGL 045.001 18th Century Novel  
ENGL 553.401 Writing Women 1660-1760  

fall 2000

ENGL 800.301 Teaching of Literature  

spring 1999

ENGL 100.401 Intro. To Literary Study  

fall 1998

ENGL 241.402 Topics in 18th Century Literature  

fall 1997

ENGL 203.001 Major British Novel  
ENGL 299.314 Independent Study  
ENGL 343.401 Seduction in Literature  

spring 1997

ENGL 100.001 Intro to Literary Study  

fall 1996

ENGL 045.001 18th Century Novel  
ENGL 090.401 Women and Literature  

spring 1995

ENGL 203.601 Major British Novel 1660-Present  

fall 1994

ENGL 045.001 The 18th-Century Novel